Chapter 1: Team The Final Exam Showdown
The glass door of the fourth floor study suite was heavier than it had any right to be, and I shouldered it open with my hip, latte sweating in my hand. The room hit me like a wall of noise. Someone was laughing. Someone else was groaning. A wad of crumpled paper sailed past my head and smacked the whiteboard.
"Thirty seconds late, Nikki," Kendall said from the center table without lifting her eyes from her laptop. Her spreadsheet glowed behind a barricade of color-coded highlighters arranged with military precision. "That's five points off your team in the preliminary round."
"Tragic," I said. "I'll write a sonnet about it later. There's a whole major for that."
Spencer flipped an index card with the violence of a woman who had already won three mock trials in her head. "If those five points aren't recovered in the macroeconomics case study, I'm instituting a no-talking penalty. For everyone. Especially you two." She jabbed a finger toward the corner where Louis and Niall had built themselves a commentary box out of scratch paper and shamelessness.
"And Niall's just chipped it wide, Spencer, he's chipped it wide!" Louis crowed, arms spread like he'd just scored in a cup final. "The keeper had no chance, that coffee's going over, I'm telling you, three minutes on the clock."
"I've got ten bucks on Louis knocking it first," Hanna said from the corner armchair, thumbs flying across her phone. "The group chat has odds. Aria's put money on you, Nikki, which is sweet and also delusional."
Aria didn't turn from the whiteboard, where a mind map of nineteenth-century literature was metastasizing in four colors. "It's an investment in chaos. It's different."
I slid into the empty chair beside Emily, who gave me a small, knowing smile and pushed a set of lecture slides toward me without a word. Emily always knew what you needed before you did. Liam stood over the table holding a digital stopwatch like it was a live grenade, haunted by a job nobody had actually given him.
"Ten-minute intervals," he said. "We voted on this."
"We did not vote," Zayn said from the back window, arms crossed, eyes shut, sun going orange behind the glass on his shoulders. "You announced it. Those are different verbs."
"Thank you, Zayn, very helpful."
And then I noticed him. Harry was already there, curled into the chair near the back with his ankles crossed, cap pulled low, long fingers wrapped around a water bottle. He'd come straight from practice, I realized, the Frisbee of his routine landing him here an hour before anyone needed him. He'd been there the whole time, quiet, watching the room with that half smile he did, and my stomach did the stupid little drop it always did before I could wrestle it back into place.
His eyes found mine for a half second. "Hey, Martinez."
"Styles." I said it lightly, like it cost nothing. It cost something.
Kendall tapped a marker against the glass wall, and the room mostly shut up, which was frankly a superpower. "Alright. Game one: rapid-fire trivia. Nikki's back, which means the gloves are officially off. Let's see who survives the first round."
"You've been saying gloves off for an hour," Niall said. "The gloves have never once been off."
"The gloves are structural," Kendall said, and I hated that it was funny.
The trivia round was chaos in the shape of education. Spencer answered macro questions before Kendall finished reading them. Aria argued a symbol interpretation with Spencer like they were co-counsel who hated each other. Zayn, without opening his eyes, dismantled a dates question that had Aria and Spencer deadlocked at the whiteboard, and both of them turned to stare at him like he'd spoken in tongues. Louis and Niall kept a running score of blunders. Kendall's coffee survived by inches, twice.
I was actually good at this part. Literature rounds were mine, and I rattled off authors and dates while my team clawed back the five points and then some. For about ten minutes I forgot to be careful, forgot to keep one eye on the seat Kendall had claimed next to Harry, the seat that had been mine at every group dinner for four years.
Then Kendall called a team switch. "Pairs for the case study round. Harry, you're with me, we've got the strongest combined econ scores on the spreadsheet. Nikki, you're with Liam and Emily."
"Strongest combined econ scores," Spencer repeated flatly. "You've never taken econ here. You transferred in September."
"I audited at my old school. It's on the sheet."
"It's on the sheet because you put it on the sheet," Spencer said. "You made the sheet."
"Spencer." Liam's voice had that broker-of-peace calm stretched thin over something harder. "It's fine. Switch is fine."
It wasn't fine. Everybody in that room knew it wasn't fine, and nobody said so, which was its own kind of loud. I gathered my slides and moved down the table, and Harry didn't look at me as I passed behind his chair. That was the part that got me. Not the pairing. The not-looking. He used to look at me across every room we'd ever been in, and he'd trained himself out of it in six weeks, and he thought nobody noticed.
He noticed me noticing. I saw it land, this little flinch in his jaw, the water bottle denting under his grip. He turned to Kendall's laptop and said something quiet that made her smile, and I sat down between Emily and Liam and pretended my chest wasn't doing arithmetic.
Emily leaned toward me, voice low, eyes on her slides. "You're doing the thing where you look like you don't care."
"I'm doing the thing where I don't care."
"Sure," she said. "And I swim for the fun of it."
Halfway through the case study round, Harry's phone buzzed. I wasn't watching, except that I was. He read it, and then he leaned over to Kendall and said something, and she laughed and started packing up her laptop while the rest of us were still mid-question.
"Where's she going?" Hanna asked, all innocence, the group chat abandoned. "Round's not over."
"Practice film session got moved up," Harry said, standing, grabbing his bag. "I said I'd drop her at the design building on the way. It's on my route."
It was not on his route. The design building was fifteen minutes in the wrong direction. Liam knew it, Zayn knew it, I knew it, and Harry knew that we knew, and he said it anyway, easy as anything, and walked out with Kendall at his elbow.
The door clicked shut. The room sat in the ringing quiet of it.
"His route," Niall said finally. "His route goes past the design building now. Fantastic. Great geography."
"Okay, that's," Louis started, and stopped, because even he couldn't find a joke big enough to cover it.
Liam set the stopwatch down on the table, very carefully, like he needed both hands to keep from throwing it. "Right. Quiz round's cancelled. Somebody else host."
I looked at my slides. The letters wouldn't line up. Spencer, of all people, reached over and quietly turned my coffee cup so the handle faced me, which was the closest thing to a hug she'd ever offered in broad daylight.
"So," Hanna said into the silence. "Who's got odds on how long that lasts? Because I'm taking bets, and this time the group chat is going to pay out."
"Take my odds, Hanna, and I'll take your silence," I said. "Both are worth about the same."
"See, that's the thing about you," Hanna said, swinging her legs off the armchair. "You make jokes instead of sentences. I've known you since sophomore year of high school. I can tell the difference."
"Hanna," Emily said, quiet, a hand on my sleeve.
"No, I'm not doing the subtle thing. Liam's doing the subtle thing. Liam's been doing the subtle thing for six weeks and look where subtle got us. He left the study session. Mid-round. To drive a girl fifteen minutes in the wrong direction."
Liam rubbed his jaw. "It's not about Kendall, exactly."
"Then what's it about, Liam? Say it out loud. The room could use a headline."
He didn't. He picked the stopwatch back up, clicked it off and on, off and on. Zayn opened his eyes for the first time in an hour.
"It's about a guy who's been given four years and won't use them," Zayn said. "That's all. It's not complicated. It's just sad."
Spencer closed her index cards with a snap. "Well. Since the quiz is cancelled, I'm going to say the thing nobody's said. If anyone else had done what he's been doing since September, we'd have called it out by now. If Niall did it to Hanna, Niall would be on fire."
"Correct," Niall said from the commentary box. "I'd be ash."
"But it's Harry, and Harry gets the pass, because Harry's charming, and because nobody wants to be the one who makes it weird." Spencer stood, collected her cards. "It's weird. I'm making it weird. You're welcome."
Aria capped her markers one at a time at the whiteboard. Four colors, folded away. She came over to me and didn't say any of the things she usually said, the heart stuff, the listen-to-yourself stuff. She just hooked her pinky into mine and held it.
"Walk me to the art building," she said.
"Your building's the other direction."
"So it is," she said.
We packed up in a silence that had different textures in it. Spencer's silence was disapproval. Liam's was the silence of a man drafting a confrontation for later. Hanna's group chat had gone quiet, which from Hanna was louder than anything she'd said all night. I put my slides in my bag without reading them and left my half-finished latte on the table, which I never do, and Emily noticed, because Emily notices everything, and said nothing, which was its own mercy.
The hallway outside the suite was library-quiet, carpet and fluorescent hum. Aria walked slow, matching my pace without being asked.
"I'm fine," I said, before she could.
"You said that before he even left. You pre-said it."
"I'm preemptively fine. It's efficient."
Aria laughed, low. "You know what I keep thinking about? Freshman year here. You and him in my dorm room arguing about whether Wuthering Heights is a love story. Three hours. You had him cornered on the floor by the radiator and he wouldn't give an inch and neither would you."
"It's not a love story, Aria. It's a story about obsession and spite and the weather."
"That's what you said." She pushed the stairwell door open. "And he said it was both, and you said nobody could be both, and he looked at you like you'd handed him a whole thesis on himself."
The stairwell echoed. I took the steps too fast to answer well.
"I'm not doing this," I said at the second floor landing. "Whatever this is. The post-game analysis. He can drive whoever he wants in whatever direction he wants. I'm not sitting in the stands with a scorecard."
"Okay." Aria said it easily, which was how I knew she didn't believe me. "Then don't. But you should know the boys aren't doing the scorecard either. Louis called him last night. Liam's barely speaking in full sentences. Zayn said one thing in the suite today and it was the most he's said in a week. You're not the only one keeping count. You're just the only one pretending not to."
Outside, the evening had gone cold and purple. The library steps were crowded with students smoking and scrolling. And across the quad, parked under the lamp by the crosswalk, was Harry's car, running, hazards on.
He was leaning against the driver's door with his phone in his hand. Kendall was nowhere in sight. Whatever the design building had needed from him was done, or had never been the point, and he was sitting there in the cold with his cap in one hand now, curls a mess, looking at nothing.
Aria saw him at the same time I did. She looked at him, then at me, then at the path that would take us straight past him.
"I'm going to go look at a painting," she said. "Wrong direction, I know. I've accepted it."
She squeezed my shoulder and went, quick, before I could argue, and then it was just me and the steps and forty feet of quad between us, and he'd seen me. Of course he'd seen me. He straightened off the car like his body made the decision before his brain did.
"Hey," he called. Not Martinez this time. Just hey, carried across the cold air.
Every smart thing I knew said keep walking. I had a whole library of smart things, four years of them, annotated.
I stood still. That was the decision, standing still, and it changed the shape of the whole evening.
He jogged the distance, breath fogging, stopping a careful six feet away. Close enough to see the practice grass stains on his shin guards still tucked in his bag. Far enough to pretend it was an accident of geometry.
"You left mid-round," I said. "Spencer's going to have you executed."
"Yeah, I know. I, uh." He turned the cap over in his hands. "The film thing wasn't moved up. I made that up."
"I know."
"I know you know." He laughed once, no humor in it. "That's the problem, isn't it. You always know. You've always known, and I keep doing it anyway, and I don't even have a good reason I can say out loud."
The hazards blinked orange across his face. On, off, on.
"Then find one," I said. "A reason. Say it out loud, Styles, or drive your route home."
He looked at me then, really looked, the way he used to across every room we'd ever been in, and for a second I thought he might actually do it.
"Nikki," he started, and then his phone lit up in his hand, buzzing, and his eyes flicked down to it. Half a second. Involuntary. Kendall's name on the screen, I didn't need to see it to know.
The half second lasted long enough.
"Goodnight, Harry," I said, and turned up the steps, and this time I didn't stop walking.
I heard my name before I heard his footsteps. "Nikki!" Harry's voice, cracked open, nothing smooth left in it. "Nikki, wait, goddamn it."
I didn't wait. My boots hit the quad grass and I cut diagonally toward the arts dorms, breath burning in the cold, blue curls whipping across my face. He was faster. Soccer player, obviously, four years of sprinting drills, and he closed the gap along the library's north wall and pulled alongside me without touching me.
"Slow down."
"You made it up," I said, not slowing. "You made the whole thing up and you stood there in the cold waiting for me. What is that? What do you think that is?"
"I don't know."
"Then go home, Harry."
"You know I can't just go home." He kept pace, fogging air, cleat-cut sneakers sliding on the frost-stiff grass. "You walked off and something in my chest went wrong. Like a pulled muscle. I couldn't sit in that car."
"You could sit in a car for an hour outside my library, but you couldn't pick the seat next to me at dinner."
That landed. I heard it land, the small hitch in his stride.
We came off the grass onto the path by the fountain, drained and dry for winter, coins frozen at the bottom. The lamp above it made an island of light and he moved into it beside me, and I stopped walking because my dorm was across the street and the last twenty yards would be surrender.
"You want to know the truth?" he said. "It's ugly."
"I've got time for ugly. Apparently I always do with you."
"Every time I look at you, I have to decide something. And I've been deciding not to. Six weeks of deciding not to. Kendall's easy. Kendall doesn't know about the radiator, or the Wuthering Heights fight, or the night you cried in Aria's bathroom and I drove everybody home after." His voice went rough. "Kendall doesn't know me. It's safe. It's the coward's seat, and I've been sitting in it."
"That's not an apology, Harry. That's an inventory."
"Nikki." He said my name like it was heavy. "Give me the reason, then. You said find one and say it out loud. I've been trying to say it since the library steps and it keeps dying in my throat, because once I say it everything changes and you might not want it changed."
"Then let me go inside."
He didn't let me go inside. I turned for the crosswalk and he followed, across the street, through the dorm's buzzing stairwell where some freshman held the door and did a visible double take at Harry Styles of Omega Chi chasing a girl with blue-purple hair up three flights. My key shook. That annoyed me more than anything, that my hand shook while his voice stayed steady behind me.
"Please. Five minutes."
"You had four years."
"I know." Quiet. Terrible. "I know exactly how long. I've counted too."
I got the door open and stepped in and turned to close it and his hand came through the gap, not on the door. On my arm. His fingers wrapped around my forearm just above the wrist, warm from running, grip firm enough that I felt it all the way up my shoulder.
I stopped. The door stayed open six inches. Cold hallway light cut across his face and his curls were wrecked and his chest was still moving fast.
"Let go of me," I said, and my voice didn't work right, because I didn't move my arm.
"Tell me to leave and I'll leave. Out loud. Actually mean it."
"You're an idiot, Harry."
"Yeah. Probably. Tell me anyway."
I looked at his hand on my arm. Four years of that hand passing me things, fixing my collar at graduation, pointing at book pages across cafeteria tables. Six weeks of it on a water bottle next to somebody else.
"I don't want you to leave," I said, and it came out like a confession I'd been holding under my tongue since September. "That's the whole problem. I don't want you to leave and I hate that you made me say it in a dorm hallway."
He exhaled like he'd been holding that breath for six weeks too, and stepped through the door, and I shut it behind him because my roommate was at the library and some doors you close on purpose.
The room was small and warm and he stood in the middle of it dripping cold air like he didn't own a body, and I crossed my arms where his hand had been, holding the shape of it.
"Say the rest," I said. "You're in my room now. There's no Kendall spreadsheet between us. Say it."
"I've been in love with you since junior year of high school." No pause. No flinch. He just opened his mouth and emptied it. "Since you corrected my essay in Liam's kitchen and told me my metaphors were lazy and I went home and rewrote the whole thing at two in the morning. Every girl since has been me running from that. You're not a crush, Nikki. You're the thing I built my whole life around not saying."
"That's a lot of words to have saved up."
"I've got more."
"Don't." I put a hand up. "Don't do the charming thing. Not here. Not after you drove fifteen minutes in the wrong direction for a month."
"You're still keeping score."
"Of course I'm keeping score. I'm the scoreboard, Harry. You broke something and I'm the thing it broke in."
He crossed the room in two steps. Too fast for me to decide anything, and maybe that was the point, that he decided for both of us for once. His hand came up to my jaw, careful, a question in it, and I answered by grabbing the front of his jacket and pulling.
The kiss was not careful. Four years of subtext came apart in it. His mouth was cold from outside and my hand was in his hair and he made a sound against my lips, low and ruined, like something unlocking. My back found the wall by my desk and he pressed into it, one thigh between mine, and I pulled his cap off his head entirely and threw it at the bed.
"Six weeks," I said against his mouth. "You get six weeks of nothing. You owe me six weeks."
"I'll pay it," he said, mouth at my jaw, my throat. "However you want it. In installments. Tonight, if you let me."
"Harry." His name came out wrecked and I hated it and didn't take it back.
"Tell me to stop and I stop."
"Don't stop."
His hands found my waist and lifted, and I went, legs around him, his mouth back on mine, and the door I'd closed stayed closed.
His fingers dug into my thighs, hard enough that I felt each one separately through my leggings, and I gasped into his mouth. He swallowed the sound and pressed me harder into the wall, my spine flat against the plaster, my poster of Audre Lorde shaking above my desk.
"Six weeks of installments," he muttered against my lips. "Starting now."
His mouth left mine and traveled down. Jaw. The spot under my ear that made me shiver. Then my neck, and I tilted my head back against the wall to give him room, my hands fisted in the back of his jacket. He opened his mouth against my throat and sucked, slow and deliberate, and I felt the heat of his tongue through the sting.
"Harry." My voice came out wrecked. "You're going to leave a mark."
"Yeah." He did it again, lower, right where my pulse was jumping. "I know."
"You're going to walk into practice tomorrow and everyone's going to see it."
"Good." His teeth grazed the skin this time, a warning bite, and my hips jerked against him without my permission. He felt it. He groaned, low in his chest, and his grip tightened again, fingers kneading the muscle of my thighs like he was trying to memorize them. "Let them see. Let everybody see what I've been too much of a coward to touch."
I yanked his jacket off one shoulder. He shrugged out of it one-armed without lifting his mouth from my neck, and it dropped to the floor in a heap, and then his hands were under my thighs again, shifting my weight, walking me away from the wall. Three steps. My desk bumped his hip. He swept the pencil cup aside with his elbow and set me down on it, my books scattering, and stood between my knees.
"Take your hair down," he said.
"It's already down, it's curly, it does what it wants."
"Nikki." He caught a blue curl between two fingers, wound it once, gently, around his knuckle. "Take. It. Down."
I pulled the tie out. My curls collapsed around my face and he watched them fall like it was something he'd paid for, his green eyes dark under lowered lids, breathing through his mouth.
"Four years," he said. "I used to see you walk into a room with this hair and lose my entire sentence."
"You never said."
"I'm saying now." He leaned in and kissed the corner of my mouth, soft, which was somehow dirtier than the biting. "I'm going to say a lot of things now."
"Say them later." I pulled his shirt up over his stomach and he raised his arms and let me strip it off. Soccer shoulders. The taper of his waist. A thin white scar on his ribs from some high school accident I'd half forgotten. My hands mapped all of it while he watched me with his mouth open.
"Your turn," he said.
I got my sweater over my head. He went still for a second, just looking, and I watched his jaw work.
"Don't make it weird," I said.
"It's not weird. It's," he exhaled, "okay, it's a little weird. You're in my head so much that seeing the actual thing is disorienting. Give me a second."
"You have a second."
He used it. Then his hands were back on me, thumbs sliding along the hem of my bra, and he didn't unhook it so much as negotiate with it, and it joined his shirt on the floor, and his mouth went back to my neck like it belonged there. His chest pressed against mine, warm and bare, and I could feel his heart going fast, faster than mine, and that did something to me that four years of subtext hadn't managed.
"Bed," I said. "The desk is cutting into my ass."
He picked me up again. My legs locked around his waist and he carried me the four steps to my roommate's empty side and put me down on the covers with a care that was almost funny, given that he'd just left a bruise on my throat. Then he crawled over me, one knee between my legs, and his thigh pressed up against me through my leggings and I arched into it, shameless, and he swore under his breath.
"Do that again."
I rolled my hips against him. He dropped his head to my shoulder, groaning, and I felt him hard against my thigh through his jeans, and something in me went loose and hot and certain all at once.
"Harry."
"Mm."
"Take these off." I pushed at his belt. "And mine."
"Bossy."
"Six weeks of interest, Styles. You said installments. This is the invoice."
He laughed against my collarbone, and the laugh broke into something rougher as my hand slipped past his waistband. He stilled. I looked up at him, my fingers working the button of his jeans, and his whole face had gone open, unguarded, the charming mask somewhere on my floor with the jacket.
"Tell me this isn't just tonight," he said. Quiet. Almost afraid.
"Shut up and get your jeans off, Harry."
He did. He kicked them off and dragged my leggings down my legs with his eyes on every inch of skin, and I lay there in the lamp light with my blue hair fanned across my roommate's comforter, watching Harry Styles kneel on my bed in nothing, looking at me like I was the thing he'd built his whole life around not saying.
"Yeah," he said softly. "This isn't just tonight."
Then he was over me again, skin on skin, and his mouth found my neck one more time, and my hands found his back, and the rest of what we didn't say we stopped needing words for.
He was careful for about a minute. Then his mouth closed over my nipple and the carefulness died. He sucked, slow, tongue flat and filthy against the peak, and my back bowed off the mattress without my permission.
"Fuck, Harry."
"Mm. Say it again."
"Fuck you."
"Working on it." He swapped to the other side, and his hand slid down my stomach, fingers spreading through the heat of me, and when he dragged one slow stroke through my slit my whole body clenched around nothing. "Christ. You're soaked. Four years of soaked, right there under a book."
"You're so proud of yourself."
"I am, actually." He pushed one finger into me and watched my face while he did it, watched my mouth fall open, and he curled it against the front wall of me like he'd studied for this. Like my body was an essay he'd been annotated all along. "Tell me what you like. I've got four years of guessing to make up for."
"That. Don't stop that."
He didn't. He worked two fingers into me, thumb circling my clit in these lazy, maddening arcs, and my hips started moving on their own, chasing his hand. My roommate's comforter bunched under my grip. My blue hair stuck to my sweat-damp throat and he reached up and moved it aside with one knuckle, which was almost too tender to survive in the middle of what his fingers were doing.
"I used to think about this," he said, low, mouth against my breastbone. "Badly. In lectures. At practice. In the car outside your library, that first week, sitting there hating myself."
"Romantic."
"Shut up. I'm confessing." He crooked his fingers hard and I gasped, and he did it again, same spot, relentless. "Confessing gets you close, doesn't it. I can feel it. You're gripping my fingers like you're afraid I'll leave."
"That's not funny."
"I know it's not." His voice went rough. "Come for me, Nikki. I want to watch your face when you do. I've imagined your face more times than I'll ever say out loud."
I came with his name bitten off against my own wrist and his fingers fucking me through it, my thighs shaking around his forearm, and he didn't look away once. He watched me fall apart with his lips parted, breathing hard like he was the one coming, and when I finally sagged into the mattress he withdrew his hand slow and brought his fingers to his mouth and sucked them clean.
"You did not just do that."
"I did. I've wanted to do that since sophomore year, specifically." He settled between my thighs, hard and heavy against my stomach, and kissed me so I could taste myself on his tongue, which was obscene and perfect. "Condom?"
"My nightstand. I'm not an amateur."
He reached over and I watched his hands shake getting the foil open, and that, that more than anything, undid me a little. Harry Styles, steady-voiced in every hallway on this campus, fumbling a condom because of me.
"Harry."
"Don't say anything nice right now," he said, sheathing himself, "or I'll lose it before I'm inside you and I've got six weeks to pay and I refuse to default."
"Then get in me and start paying."
He laughed, and the laugh turned into a groan as he pressed in. Slow. He went slow, inch by inch, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, both of us making sounds we'd have died before making in public. He filled me up and stopped, buried to the hilt, shaking.
"Okay," he breathed. "Okay. Four years. Give me a second."
"You have a second."
"I keep needing seconds around you. It's humiliating."
"It's the only honest thing about you."
He pulled back and thrust in, and we both stopped talking. He set a rhythm that built and built, deep, deliberate, his hips rolling into mine, and I hooked my legs over the backs of his thighs and pulled him closer, closer, until there was no space left between us at all. His chest dragged against my nipples with every stroke. The bed frame tapped the wall in time and neither of us cared.
"Harder," I said into his ear. "I'm not made of glass."
"You've been saying harder at me since junior year."
"So take the note."
He did. He braced one hand on the headboard and fucked me properly then, long strokes that shoved me up the mattress, his thigh muscles flexing under my calves, and I dug my nails down his back and felt him shudder. The room filled with it, the slap of skin, our breathing, the small broken noises he made when I tightened around him on purpose.
"Nikki, fuck, do that again and this ends early."
"Then end early. I've got years of material on you."
"Not yet." He shifted, hooked one arm under my knee, and drove in at an angle that hit something new and devastating, and I cried out loud enough that the girl next door would hear. He grinned against my jaw, feral and delighted. "There. That's the spot."
"How do you know?"
"Because your whole face just changed. I told you. I've imagined this a hundred times and apparently I was studying."
I laughed, and the laugh broke into a moan, and he kept the angle and the pace and reached down between us with his thumb on my clit, and it was over for me fast. The second orgasm rolled through me harder than the first, my vision whiting at the edges, his name coming out of me in pieces. I felt him feel it, felt his rhythm stutter, felt him bury his face in my neck and swear and spill into the condom with a sound like he'd been hit, hips jerking, my name said twice into my skin.
He stayed there. Inside me, on me, his weight a warm sprawl, both of us breathing like we'd run sprints. His heart hammered against my sternum.
"That was," he said.
"Don't do a sentence. You'll ruin it."
"I was going to say it was four years late."
I slid my hand up into his wrecked curls. Outside, the campus had gone quiet. My legs were still wrapped around him and I made no move to unwrap them, which said everything my mouth wasn't going to.
Eventually he rolled off and dealt with the condom and lay on his back beside me, staring at my ceiling, one arm folded behind his head. I traced the thin white scar on his ribs with one finger.
"So," I said. "What happens tomorrow."
He turned his head to look at me, and something moved through his face, something I didn't like, some ahead-of-itself grief.
"Liam's going to kill me. Probably literally. Spencer's going to supervise."
"That's not what I asked, Harry."
He was quiet for a while. Then he rolled onto his side, propped on one elbow, and pulled the comforter up over us both, and said, "Kendall asked me to the winter formal last week."
My stomach dropped. "And you said?"
"I said I'd think about it." His eyes held mine. "I'm done thinking. But I've got to un-say it to her face, and then I've got to stand in front of nine people who watched me screw this up for six weeks and own it. Tomorrow's going to be a massacre."
"You're not worried about the massacre."
"No." He touched one blue curl, wound it around his knuckle again. "I'm worried about you. About whether this survives me having been an idiot. Because I can take what the guys hand me tomorrow. What I can't take is you deciding I waited too long."